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The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or uninte
by resoluteteeth 4y ago
The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice.
Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice.
Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available.
In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).
Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.
Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.
- pessimizer 4y ago> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice I wouldn't be surprised if as many or more Windows users were downloading it than downloading Libreoffice. The problem is that the name isn't punchy and is unpronounceable in English. Plenty of people who are completely knowledgeable about the situation still refer to Libreoffice as Openoffice. It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft, and destroyed the entire Apache Foundation for me. I avoid all of their projects, because if that project has a commercial competitor with deep pockets, I can't trust it not to be intentionally bad or broken.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.
- mgbmtl 4y agoI'm a native French speaker and when speaking English, I just say "Office" because LibreOffice sounds weird. And for similar reasons, I never say "I used The Gimp". I do very much appreciate both projects. Naming is hard.
- asddubs 4y agothe gimp is just exceptionally awful, and was apparently intentionally named after the gimp from pulp fiction, which makes it even worse
- 908B64B197 4y ago> I never say "I used The Gimp". Have you seen Pulp Fiction?
- edm0nd 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B34DmsMxUlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B34DmsMxUlA
- School-Cotton 4y agoThat's a perfectly fine pronunciation, but the point is that it's not an English word, so plenty of people will think it looks weird or not know how to pronounce it.
- patmorgan23 4y agoWhat till you hear how many non English words are in your everyday vocabulary.
- School-Cotton 4y agoWords in my everyday vocabulary are English words by definition, regardless of whether they're of foreign origin, in the sense that I meant. "Libre" isn't an English word at all; not even as a loanword from a foreign language.
- pcwalton 4y ago> It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft Do you have any evidence for this? I would like to think that HN is above making these kinds of totally unfounded accusations. (I'm not affiliated with any party here and don't care about the conflict at all.)
- pessimizer 4y agoNo evidence, but that doesn't mean that they're unfounded, that means that they're unproven. There's only one party that profits from the confusion, and it's a party that spent a fortune on bribes (or "grants" or whatever) during the OOXML debacle.
- outside1234 4y agoSort of like making an unfounded accusation against Microsoft that can't be disproven. C'mon, we are all better than that here.
- coliveira 4y agoThe commenter is right to the point. Look at the sponsors of Apache foundation, and you'll see that Google and Microsoft appear as some of the largest contributers. Of course they don't want to antagonize these companies. The best way to look at Apache and simular foundations is as infrastructure maintained by big companies to redirect open source effort to their goals. They use third parties to do this because the companies themselves enjoy very little trust from the open source community.
- sgift 4y agoSo, no evidence. Just FUD. Got it.
- _benedict 4y agoThe Apache Foundation has next to zero input into how any of the projects are run, so even if this were true it would be irrelevant. How exactly do you imagine this influence working? It would have to be quite overt to have any effect on so many projects that are self organising.
- elros 4y agoI just read it as "lib-reoffice" cause it's impossible not to if you've done manual package management in the past :-D
- Beltalowda 4y ago> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice It gets about 235,000 downloads/week, most of which are for Windows.[1] It doesn't seem SourceForge shows the absolute number of downloads, and while ~235k/week isn't a huge huge number, it's still pretty significant. Dunno how this compares to LibreOffice or other software packages (e.g. Firefox). [1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/
- actionfromafar 4y agoIt's a pretty darn high number. Compound interest on that negative goodwill...
- benibela 4y agoYou can click on the chart symbol next to the number
- Beltalowda 4y agoAh, that's very non-obvious! Summing up the daily numbers the total downloads is about 1.7 million for the 4.1.12 release from May.
- spacechild1 4y ago> but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice Definitely. I have been using OpenOffice for years until I found out by accident that LibreOffice exists... It's a shame!
- asddubs 4y agoSaw openoffice on a friend of my father's laptop a while back. it had a 4k screen and OO did not support it, causing every pixel to be 4x the size of other applications, it looked really awful. I told him to download libreoffice instead and that openoffice was not being developed anymore. He thanked me and told me that he had been annoyed by how awful it looks. so yeah, it definitely happens
- corrral 4y agoI bet if I polled friends and family the ones who know the name OpenOffice would outnumber the ones who know LibreOffice 2:1. And it's only that favorable for LibreOffice because I know quite a few other computer nerds.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ipaddr 4y agoThank you for your post. I am one of those users and I'm downloading officeLibre now. Open office has been usable but plagued with random issues.
- sheepdestroyer 4y ago> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice I'm far away and can't help my parents. They recently replaced their computer and asked a local tech to reinstall their apps. I told them to ask for LibreOffice. The guy put OpenOffice... The damage from Apache is real and massive.
- nekoashide 4y agoYeah, that was me, I totally downloaded it as the first thing when setting up a new computer for years. I thought the errors opening some excel documents was because it was open source. Little did I know it was effectively abandonware.
- arbitrage 4y agoIf you let the project die on the vine however, you can clean up after it dies without having to take the hit for actually being the ones to kill it. Apache is in an unenviable position, here. Might as well let nature take its course.
- Taywee 4y agoI really don't understand why Apache doesn't just put the OpenOffice branding on LibreOffice. Is there any real reason to not just make OpenOffice a branded distribution of LibreOffice at this point? edit: oh right, licenses. LibreOffice is MPL, and the Apache Foundation won't touch it.
- Hedepig 4y agoMy guess would be corporate bureaucracy
- ozim 4y agoI like name LibreOffice much better. Maybe because when I tried using OpenOffice while I was at university it sucked really bad. I tried LibreOffice like 5 years ago and I am using it day to day and I donated money to them and consider donating again.
- scarmig 4y agoSpeaking purely based on the name, not the actual software: What comes to mind when I hear the name LibreOffice is historically mediocre FOSS that you'd only choose for ideological reasons, which is why the libre part needs to be advertised up front. When I imagine what it looks like, I'm imagining some creaky UI that looks like GIMP from 1999. It's worse, even, than OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle, which suggests that LibreOffice is a shitty knockoff of a shitty knockoff. Honestly even StarOffice is more appealing to my ears. I'm positive that all of this is deeply unfair, but that's what comes to mind. Part of the negativity probably relates to conflating LibreOffice and OpenOffice in my head.
- prmoustache 4y agoNow when I will hear libreoffice again, what will come to mind are clueless illiterate gringos ridiculing themselves on hacker news.
- robonerd 4y ago> because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle I disagree. I associate "Open" with corporate-interest driven "open source", BSD licensing, and cynically misleading branding (OpenDNS). 'Open' is the word you use if specifically don't want to invoke GNUy left-adjacent ideologies.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoOpen Server. But even with these damaging examples which I agree with you about, it's still better.
- deleted 4y ago
- b112 4y agoSomeone should sue them, for knowingly, willlingly releasing bug ridden, security issue laden software. Seriously. This is a perfect test case. It should start with a 15 day demand letter, and progress from there.
- sgift 4y agoSo, someone should put all of the free and open source software at risk (if the "we guarantee nothing" part of their license doesn't hold ground for them it holds ground for no one) because you want to attack the ASF for not doing what you want? What a great plan.
- CDRdude 4y agoUnless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
- b112 4y agoI see downvotes, but there is a difference between "our stuff has a bug" and "we're actively keeping this project alive, including updating binary downloads, even though we know it has endless CVEs, some of them years old." One is an innocent problem. The other is willful negligence. And we need to start suing for this sort of thing. We need fines for companies willingly causing harm.
- Darmody 4y agoI know people who even nowadays install OpenOffice and I have to explain them that it's not what they should be using, etc, etc.
- recursive 4y agoI just learned this right now, by reading this.
- pulse7 4y agoThey need to switch OpenOffice to LibreOffice and use both names for the same product (which is called today LibreOffice).